THREE
SOCIETY
To convince oneself of the inconceivable greatness and stature of Beethoven’s work, it should be compared to the achievement of literary classicism in Germany around 1800. If Goethe was able to write isolated poems such as ‘Über allen Gipfeln’, stanzas like the first of ‘Füllest wieder Busch und Tal’, in Beethoven everything produced after about op. 18 is of this standard, leaving aside ‘palette waste’ (of which there is very little in Beethoven). And the mighty sweep, the momentum of its highest flights, as in ‘Pandora’, is actually also the formal law of Beethoven’s work. A classicism without plaster of Paris; mysteriously immune to the outmoded, even where it is beginning to become uninterpretable. Of course, this cannot be ascribed simply to superior talent (neither Goethe nor Jean Paul was a dunce); it is due both to the pristine state of his medium, by which it was predestined to depict the human as nature, and to the historical moment, when music and not poetry converged with philosophy, at least in Germany.
[69]
The affinity between Beethoven’s humanity and a certain type of family-album poetry deserves precise analysis; for example:
Wer ein treues Weib errungen,
Stimm in unseren Jubel ein,78
[Who a loyal wife has won, let him join in our rejoicing,]
or:
Und ein liebes Herz erreichet,
Was ein liebes Herz geweiht.79
[And a loving heart attains what a loving heart has hallowed.]
In such lines the grandeur and the ideology of the bourgeoisie are so intertwined that neither is conceivable without the other. Thoughts of marriage and children are found even in the songs addressed to the Ferne Geliebte.
[70]
Schiller has something of the man risen from a lowly station who, embarrassed in good society, starts shouting to make himself heard. Power and impudence’ – the bragging of the petty-bourgeois, which may be a general characteristic of the brutal bourgeois craving for ostentation, as observed by Max Horkheimer. Included in this gesture is the self-incited, pealing, violent laughter and a certain tendency to ‘explode’. This lies at the source of the solemn tone, and underlies the whole of idealism – a certain nobility in the sense of grandeur, sovereignty over nature,80 compensates for the vulgar, inferior element. Behind the maxims lie the letters about woollen stockings exchanged with their mothers by pastors’ sons working as private tutors. This element must be defined as an objective aspect of bourgeois bombast. It is usually linked to the fiction of strength. In Schiller it is held in check by a strong intellect, but what remains of it is finally pure weakness. Beethoven is not immune to this – though his work is saved by the enormous density of its purely musical substance.
[71]
What we know about Beethoven as a private person suggests that the grim, unfriendly aspect of his character had to do with shame and rejected love. An extreme contrast to Wagner in the formation of the bourgeois character. A man who becomes a monad and clings to the monadological form to preserve his humanity. Wagner, by contrast, becomes inordinately loving because he cannot withstand the monadic situation. – Associated with the boorishness is an open-handed generosity, but also mistrust. – The aloofness derives from the fact that for the proper human being, as represented by Beethoven, all human relationships have a moment unworthy of humanity. – This is allied to strong traits of aggression, sadism, of noisy, blustering laughter, of insult. Coupled to an element of will: he commands himself to laugh. The demonic is always self-imposed, never quite ‘genuine’, or ‘natural’. Musicians’ humour, in which laughter is emancipated from spirit, almost always has this trait. – The confinement of humanity to music alone is linked to shame. How brusque someone needs to be in order to write ‘Dir werde Lohn’ [Yours be the reward].81 – This complexion of Beethoven’s humour leads again and again to polyphony. Canons such as ‘Bester [Herr] Graf, Sie sind ein Schaff!]’ [WoO 183]. Polyphony in Beethoven has an entirely new meaning: a solution enforced by yoking together disparate, disintegrated elements. It has to work. Hence the canons.
[72]
‘Even the early Beethoven was the foremost living composer.’ Thomas-San-Galli, Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 88.
[73]
On the formation of the bourgeois character in music, see Chopin, Briefe [ed. by Alexander Guttry, Munich 1928], pp. 382f: ‘The bourgeois class wants to be amazed, dazzled by mechanical virtuosity, which I am unable to do. Genteel folk who travel a lot are arrogant; but they are also educated and judicious when they are prepared to look closely at themselves. Yet they are always so caught up and isolated within their conventional boredom that they care little whether music is good or bad, as they have to listen to it from morning till night in any case’, and so on. In this connection, Beethoven’s mode of notation, aiming at a mechanical effect, as in the ms of the ‘Geister’ Trio.82
[74]
It is conceivable that Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf – because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today. ‘The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.’ Karl Kraus.83
[75]
On the theory of Beethoven’s deafness, cf. Julius Bahle, Eingebung und Tat im musikalischen Schaffen [Ein Betrag zur Psychologie der Entwicklungs- und Schaffensgesetze schöpferischer Menschen], Leipzig 1939, p. 164:
We should not, therefore, dismiss out of hand the link drawn by Romain Rolland between Beethoven’s deafness and his immense inner concentration, his incessant auditory seeking and grasping. This was confirmed to Rolland by Dr Marage, in his diagnosis of the postmortem findings. He wrote to Rolland: The cause of Beethoven’s deafness seems to me to lie in a congestion of blood in the inner ear and the auditory centres, caused by overstrain of the organ through excessive concentration, and in the pitiless inevitability of thought, as you put it so beautifully. A comparison with Indian yoga seems to me entirely apt.’ (R. Rolland, Beethovens Meisterjahre, Leipzig 1930, p. 226.) According to this diagnosis, therefore, Beethoven had sacrificed himself on the altar of deafness in order ‘to draw nearer than others to God, and from that vantage point to spread the divine radiance among mankind.
[76]
‘O you physicians, scholars and sages,’ he cried in ecstasy, ‘do you not see how the Spirit creates form, how the inner god made Hephaestus lame in order to make him repulsive to Aphrodite and so to preserve him for the art of fire and crafts; how Beethoven went deaf so that he could hear nothing but the singing daemon within him…’ Georg Groddeck, Der Seelensucher, Leipzig/Vienna 1921, p. 194.84
[77]
That Beethoven never goes out of date is connected, perhaps, to the fact that reality has not yet caught up with his music: ‘real humanism’.85
[78]
To say that Beethoven’s music expressed the World Spirit, that it was the content of that Spirit or suchlike, would undoubtedly be pure nonsense. What is true, however, is that his music expressed the same experiences which inspired Hegel’s concept of the World Spirit.
[79]
The reluctance of the Age of Enlightenment to deal with bourgeois life in the drama, its inclination to reserve it to comedy and finally to smuggle it ironically into drama as comédie larmoyante,86 or to excuse the bürgerliches Trauerspiel as an anomaly – all this may not perhaps reflect simply the consequence of court convention under Absolutism, but also an awareness of the non-representability of the bourgeois world, of the contradiction between the decay of images within objects and their presentation as image. The novel and comedy were possible to the extent that they made this contradiction their theme. And it is conceivable that the unparalleled upsurge of music in the same period is connected to the fact that it lent voice to the empirical subject without initially being affected by that paradox or aporia. In Beethoven, a middle-class person can speak, without shame, like a king. Underlying this, to be sure, is the profound indigence of all musical classicity, Beethoven’s ‘Empire bombast’ – perhaps one of the most fundamental points on which he is open to critique.
[80]
It is peculiar to the bourgeois Utopia that it is not yet able to conceive an image of perfect joy without that of the person excluded from it:* it can take pleasure in that image only in proportion to the unhappiness in the world. In Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the text of the Ninth Symphony, any person is included in the circle provided he is able to call ‘even a single soul his own in this wide world’; that is, the person who is happy in love. ‘But he who has none, let him steal weeping from our company’. Inherent in the bad collective is the image of the solitary, and joy desires to see him weep. Moreover, the rhyme word in German, stehle [steal], points rightly to the property relationship. We can understand why the ‘problem of the Ninth Symphony’ was insoluble. In the fairytale Utopia, too, the stepmother who must dance in burning shoes or is stuffed into a barrel spiked with nails is an inseparable part of the glorious wedding. The loneliness punished by Schiller, however, is no other than that produced by his revellers’ community itself. In such a company, what is to become of old maids, not to speak of the souls of the dead?87
[81]
My study on Beethoven will have to offer a critique of Pfitzner’s theory of the creative ‘idea’ in support of my view of the dialectical nature of great music. Cf. Bahle [Eingebung und Tat] p. 308; quotation from Pfitzner: ‘In music… a passage always is and affects us just as it is in itself, and is not altered by any change in its position or its context’ (refute this with reference to opp. 57 and 111); ‘ultimately, music should be judged by it, the small unit (the melody); not by the effect of this or that piece of music as a whole; just as gold(! !) is assayed in terms of its carat number, and not by the objects made from it’ (cf. Pfitzner, Gesammelte Schriften [Augsburg 1926], vol. II, pp. 23 and 25). Here, the relationship between the Romantic postulation of the individual lyrical subject as absolute, and the notion of the theme as possession or value (gold!), is quite obvious. Cf. ‘Musical Thieves, Unmusical Judges’.88 Bahle, p. 309, uses the term ‘atomistic’.
[82]
The Mozartian ‘divine frivolity’ refers, in terms of the philosophy of history, to the moment when the libertine freedom and sovereignty of the feudal order passed over into that of the bourgeoisie, which, however, at this stage still resembled the feudal. The double meaning of ‘Herr’ (Mr; lord). Humaneness still coincides here with libertinism. Utopia appears in the form of this identity. Mozart died just before the French Revolution lapsed into repression. The affinity of this aspect with traits of the young Goethe. The ‘Muses’ son’89 is a kind of Mozartian prodigy, a primal phenomenon.
[83]
Regarding Beethoven and the French Revolution: Wagner-Lexikon 262 (Mozart’s half-cadences as Tafelmusik – mealtime entertainment).90 – Symphonic themes are not absolute antitheses, ibid. 439.91 – NB: Beethoven’s relationship to the French Revolution is to be understood in terms of specific technical concepts. – I should like to hold one thing fast: just as the French Revolution did not create a new social form but helped a structure already formed to break through, in the same way Beethoven relates to forms. His work involves not so much the production of forms, as their reproduction out of freedom (something very similar happens in Kant). This reproduction out of freedom has, however, at least one strongly ideological trait. The moment of untruth lies in the fact that something appears to be in the process of creation which in fact is already there (that is exactly the relationship between precondition and result that I have tried to define). Hence, also, the ‘impudent’ quality: the pretension to freedom of someone who, in reality, was obeying. The expression of necessity in Beethoven is incomparably more substantial than that of freedom, which always has something fabricated about it (as with the mandatory joy). Freedom is real in Beethoven only as hope. That is one of the most important social links. The passage: ‘Yours be the reward’ should be compared, for example, to the close of Fidelio.92 The ‘unattainability of joy’.93
[84]
Fichte passage in original: Rochlitz, IV, p. 350. – Beethoven and the French Revolution, Rochlitz III, p. 315. – Beethoven’s physiognomy as that of the idealist, Rochlitz IV, p. 353.94 In the same connection, certain passages from Hegel’s Philosophy of History, such as that on the Chinese.95
[85]
Beethoven reveres Seume; Thomas-San-Galli, Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 68.96
[86]
The history of great bourgeois music at least since Haydn is the history of the interchangeable, or fungible: that no individual thing exists ‘in itself’, and everything only in relation to the whole. The truth and untruth of this music can be determined from the solution it offers to the question of fungibility – which has both a progressive and a regressive tendency. The question in all music is: How can a whole exist without doing violence to the individual part? The answer to this question depends, however, on the general state of the productive forces of music at a given time; more specifically: the more highly developed these forces are, the greater are the difficulties presented to a composer. In Beethoven (and Haydn) the solution is bound up with a certain bareness of the material, a kind ofupright, middle-class frugality. In this respect Beethoven represents a particular moment: the melody is not yet emancipated, yet the individual part is already substantial; but, again, its substance derives from the bareness of the whole. Melody achieves emancipation only in moments of transcendence. Only at this stage is ‘classicism’ in music possible at all, and cannot be reconstructed. (These moments of transcendence do not occur in Haydn, nor do we find in his work the substantiality of the human individual, the eloquence of the detail, however meagre. This gives rise to an element of constriction, even of narrow-mindedness in Haydn, despite all the grandeur. The functional interconnections present throughout Haydn’s music give an impression of competence, active life and suchlike categories, which ominously call to mind the rising bourgeoisie.) NB: This universal fungibility expresses itself in late capitalism in the passion for organization, the incessant rearranging. It is as if no brick were to be left on any other, especially when all novelty is precluded by the foundation. You need only watch them at work with their blue pencils, their red ink, their scissors.
[87]
The way in which music produces itself in Beethoven represents the totality of social work. Go back to Haydn. His works often resemble those mechanical models of early factories in which everyone plays his part in the great whole – as in the Salzburg fountain displays. In Beethoven, however, the totality of work has a critical aspect; that is, work consists primarily of a paring down for the sake of totality. It already includes the appropriation of surplus value; that is, something is subtracted from each individual theme to make it serve the whole. But that, too, is then negated once more. Musical relationships in Mozart never have the character of work: that distinguishes him from Beethoven and Haydn.
[88]
In the great epic, in the epic as such and in all narrative, there exists, as an intrinsic element of their truth, a certain stupidity, an incomprehension, a not-being-in-the-know – something by no means adequately conveyed by the traditional notion of naivety.* Perhaps, at the deepest level, it is the refusal to accept fungibility, an attachment to the Utopian belief that there is something worth reporting. For fungibility repudiates the mythical world to which narrative from the outset is addressed. Myth, after all, is the unchanging. At the origin of all myths is something anachronistic. But the paradox is that precisely this stupidity is the precondition of epic reason, and even, in a sense, of cognition itself, of experience in the sense elaborated here, whereas clevernesss destroys such knowledge and thus, in fact, converges with stupidity, a narrow-minded fixation on the here-and-now. In this context, we should think not only of Gotthelf, whose stupidity is not entirely wise, but of Goethe, Stifter and Keller. In Martin Salander, for example, it is very easy to recognize the stupidity of the attitude: ‘Look how bad people are today’, and to point out that Keller knew nothing of the economics of the period of German unification with their attendant crisis. But it is only this stupidity which allows Keller to write a narrative and not merely a report about the beginnings of high capitalism and, this being so, the two crooked lawyer brothers tell us more about fungibility that any theory except the one which is wholly true.97 Perhaps it is this very stupidity which is indispensable to the epic temper, and has now been lost. (Today, epic itself has been taken over by fungibility, in its praise of any intellectual, though he resemble a yokel; and Brecht’s gestie art amounts to a technical abuse of epic stupidity. Even in Kafka, it is faked to a certain extent.) But this loss leads us to one of the deepest questions of art. It is the question concerning the dubious nature of technical progress, which is always progress in the domination of nature.98 My musicological study of 1941 does not go nearly far enough in this respect.99 In a painting by a German primitive or by an early Italian master, it is easy to explain this or that characteristic by an inadequate mastery of perspective. But would this same painting be conceivable at all if the perspective were improved? Is not the identification of errors of perspective a mark of positivist obtuseness? Is not the constellation formed by the technical imperfection of the painting and what it expresses, in fact, indissoluble? Or take the famous contention that Beethoven was bad at instrumentation, which can be backed by such cogent evidence as the insufficiency of natural horns and trumpets, and thus the ‘holes’ in the writing of orchestral parts. Indeed, could his instrumentation have been better, without a profound conflict arising between the greater mastery of nature and the core of Beethoven’s experience? One need only call to mind the inane, wholly superficial assertion that Strauss had the technique and Beethoven the content, to realize how nonsensically rationalistic100 is the very concept of technique, as I have used it up to now. – Poverty is of importance here. – In capitalism, always too little and too much. – NB: Walser. The provincial, backward element, which Kafka mobilized.
[89]101
It is very easy to demonstrate defects of instrumentation in Beethoven; over-thin passages caused by insufficient knowledge of woodwinds; obese tutti (for example, in the Seventh) which swamp the thematic events. But in his work, as in all significant art, the faults are inseparable from the substance. This means that they are incorrigible. The unison solo of the bassoons in the coda to the Finale of the Fifth [bars 317–19] is, of course, preposterous – ecstatic bassoons are comic. But one need only imagine them replaced by a trombone: still more preposterous. This is a very large subject; it concerns the true location of that which alone deserves to be called style.
[90]
The symphonic principle of the contraction of time, of ‘development’ in the deeper sense, of ‘work’, corresponds to epistasis in the drama. Today, under direct domination, both are in decline. Only a fine distinction will decide whether such decline means the liquidation of resistance or its ubiquity.
[91]
The theory of musical development – a primary concern of criticism – ought to deal with the introduction to Act I of Siegfried. Mime’s fruitless work. His theme is a classical model of symphonic development, from the Scherzo of Schubert’s Quartet in D minor. But in Wagner the elaboration of the model, as expression, takes on the character of a fruitless, compulsive circling.102 In this, Wagner revealed something of the nature of musical development itself: that the futility which he made explicit is objectively implicit in development as such. This, however, is linked to the social nature of work, which is both ‘productive’, in that it keeps society alive, yet also fruitless, in its blind marking of time (the tendency to regress to mere reproduction). If the change in the principle of development between Beethoven and Wagner reflects a developmental tendency of the bourgeoisie as a whole, the later phase also tells us something about the earlier one: that development was always inherently impossible, and could succeed only by a momentary paradox. – Work is to be understood as a central concept in Beethoven. Indeed, the principle of work’s symphonic objectivity reflects its social objectivity as well.
[92]
On the subject of the musical development – work – bourgeois bustle – intrigue: Figaro’s aria in the Barber, especially the growing seriousness towards the end, almost as in a symphony of Beethoven.
[93]
The principle of the development as ‘doing’, accomplishing, something; society’s production process finally traceable back to the nature of bustle, as it is found in Haydn. There, however, it is also mythical: the bustling of spirits, pixies, music’s poltergeist commotion, its ultimately spooky activity. This is the musical equivalent of the relationship of idealism to myth.103
[94]
For the bourgeois: animation = a bustling eagerness to get something done. Study the relation of ‘animation’ to the mechanical element (for example, Rondo op. 12, no. 3).
[95]
On Beethoven – and various others. In the discussion of the transition from the development-based style to the late style – or perhaps of development as largely insignificant – investigate once more the idea of the imbroglio, of intrigue, and its decline. This decline cannot be attributed solely to the predominance of the realistic, empirical moment, but has its own intrinsic reasons. Just as, in a certain sense, the musical development was never entirely possible, giving rise to insoluble problems and paradoxes, intrigue takes on a foolish, fatuous quality when the characters are fully developed and concretely presented. In this fatuity competition recognizes its own dreadfulness as in a distorting mirror. This can be readily seen in the early Schiller. How inane are the machinations of Eboli and the courtiers, the forced caskets and purloined letters in Don Carlos, set against the confrontation between Philip and Posa. How far-fetched is the motivation for the mistaken murder of Leonore in Fiesko. How easily could all the havoc in Kabale und Liebe [Intrigue and Love] have been cut short if Ferdinand had shown even the faintest scepticism towards the fake love letter addressed to a figure of fun, and if Luise, even if she wanted to respect an enforced vow of silence, had found a way to apprise him of the feebly concealed truth. This foolishness reached its height in dramatists who took the conflict-form seriously (NB: conflict = unity of action), such as Hebbel (for example, in Herodes), and is still detectable in the somewhat inane symbolism of the late Ibsen (the sledge in Borkman, under the runners of which the old subordinate and father comes to grief). Admittedly, the whole notion of intrigue is bourgeois in the sense that bourgeois work appears as intrigue and the typical bourgeois, its mediator, as a villain. But the viewpoint from which this seems the case is that of the absolutist court. The drama of intrigue is always also about work as a means of social climbing, ignoring and desecrating hierarchies. This is why the drama of intrigue is possible only as an absolutist form, an allegorical ceremony, and not with full bourgeois individuation, since this is precisely what it judges. The greatest French drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would need to be studied in this context. Goethe balked at the stupidity of intrigue – there is none in his work – which is why his plays are as much less ‘dramatic’ than Schiller’s as they are more lasting. All these problems apply equally to music. Ceremonial intrigue would correspond to the fugue – while the sonata would stand for the fully developed intrigue as successfully achieved – though also bearing the seeds of its own demise. Beethoven’s oeuvre is the theatre of both – accomplishment and dissolution. Two decisive questions remain:
1 In concrete technical terms, what leads to dissolution?
2 Why was the sonata possible, but not the bourgeois tragedy?
The second question seems likely to go very deep.* [96]104
In many of Schubert’s works which are orientated towards Beethoven – not the last, but most of the piano sonatas, the outer movements of both Trios, the Trout Quintet and even certain parts of the Octet – one is struck by a certain threadbare or conventional quality of the material. This is not due to a lack of originality – for who could have had more original ideas? – nor does it result directly from inferior skill in through-composition. It is linked, rather, to a certain pre-given character of the musical language which, though running counter to Romanticism’s subjective freedom, dominated the entire movement up to the expressive clichés of Wagner. Even in Schubert, the commodity character of music is indicated by a shop-soiled, shabby, slipshod element, which emerges most clearly where the music seems most Beethovenian. This also has to do with the petty-bourgeois element – as if someone in shirtsleeves were making a political speech in a beer-garden (especially certain openings like that of the 
major Trio and of the late Piano Sonata in C minor). These are also the moments in Schubert which seem most dated and nineteenth century. Although they are, without exception, grandly conceived and genuine in their musical language, they employ this language too fluently, are insufficiently distanced, almost too sure of it. Especially in Schubert, as compared to Beethoven, there is an element of reification with regard to the material. Beethoven’s greatness lies precisely in his difference from it. There is nothing reified in his work, since he is able to dissolve the ready-made quality of the material – which, nevertheless, is simpler in his work than in Schubert’s. He does so by reducing it to such elementary forms that it no longer manifests itself as material at all. Beethoven’s apparent asceticism towards subjective, spontaneous inspiration is precisely the way to elude reification. Beethoven, the master of positive negation: discard, that you may acquire. The shrinkage of the Beethovenian adagio is to be seen in this context. That in the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata is the last adagio in music. The one in the Ninth is the alternative form. The last Quartets and Sonatas contain only variations on it, or Lieder; that is, Beethoven recognizes the incompatibility of the ‘theme’, as a melody sufficient in itself, with the grand design. The mature Brahms had a very sensitive ear for this critical moment in Beethoven.
[97]
NB: Beethoven’s critical method of composition stems from the meaning of the music itself, and not from psychology.
[98]
The relationship of logic to tonality and of work to musical dynamics needs to be formulated. Probably logic – always pruning and abstracting – guarantees appropriation through work in the reflexive form. This is the innermost question in Beethoven.
[99]
Don Quixote’s secret.* – If the disenchantment of the world, which Benjamin described as the destruction of aura by mechanization,105 – that is, by the spirit of pragmatism (in aesthetic terms, perhaps: by the spirit of the comic) – may be called the original and essential contribution of the bourgeoisie, it is no less true that dream and Utopia are themselves bound to the existence of this spirit as their antithesis. We really know only of bourgeois art, and what we call feudal art – such as Dante – is bourgeois in spirit. In truth, there is only as much art as art is impossible. Hence, the existence of all major art forms is a paradox, and most of all the form of the novel, which is the bourgeois genre 
Don Quixote and Sancho are inseparable.
[100]
Perhaps the concept of the ‘new’, which in ‘Likes and Dislikes’106 I made the yardstick of spontaneous artistic experience, was already itself a distortion in terms of the history of philosophy – that is, it was the way spontaneous experience appeared from the perspective of a world which already precluded it. The moment of the new in Beethoven, which I see as the opposite of the fixed ‘pattern’, is itself confined to his very late work.
[101]
NB: There is no circumventing the problem of Beethoven’s fixed, formulaic language. Shorthand forms emerge, and in the very late period are petrified into allegories. This can be demonstrated as early as the first movement of op. 10, no. 2. Something decisively bourgeois in Beethoven is no doubt at work here. Then there is the enormously extensive use of abbreviations in his manuscripts, as I have pointed out with regard to the ‘Geister’ Trio [cf. fr. 20]. Study the literature on this. – The mechanical quality is linked to the solemnity. Cf. the quotation from Chopin on p. 8 of this notebook [cf. fr. 74]..
[102]
That the subject of Fidelio is fidelity rather than love has often been noted. This should be put into a theoretical context, especially with regard to the anti-sentimental element. The notion of brio, of striking fire from the soul,107 as something directed against the private sphere, and against that of expression. The ‘public’ quality of Beethoven’s work, even in the intimacy of the chamber music. The element of expression as a matter of technique is the real antithesis between him and Romanticism. – In this context, consider Kant’s doctrine of marriage and Hegel’s concept of respectability as opposed to morality.108
[103]
Bekker’s thesis regarding the ‘community-forming power’ of the symphony109 needs to be reformulated. The symphony is the aes- theticized (and already neutralized) form of the public meeting. Categories within it, such as oratory, debate, resolution (the decisive element) and ceremony should be identified. The truth and untruth of the symphony are decided in the agora. What the late Beethoven rejects is just this element of the conclave, of bourgeois ritual.*
[104]
Alienation appears in Beethoven as something quasi administrative, institutional – as ‘bustle’. Beethoven and the State would not be without sense as a title. Hegelianism. Long stretches of the musical enactment as the self-preservation of the totality – hence the moment of objectification. In addition, the military aspect and the popular assembly.
[105]
From a conversation with Max [Horkheimer] and Thomas Mann on 9 April 1949.110 The subject was Russia, and in face of our very heated attacks, T.M. took up a cautiously apologetic position. In connection with the debate on art he advanced the view that it is questionable whether art could lay claim to complete freedom and autonomy, and that its greatest epochs have probably coincided with its attachment to a higher authority (this motif is touched on in his Faustus novel).111 I did not contest this thesis (although I would say that even Bach, compared to Beethoven, shows a moment of hetero- nomy, of something not entirely embraced by the subject which, despite his superior ‘accomplishment’, places him, in historico-philo- sophical terms, below Beethoven. However, I did argue that this ought not to be made into an ideology for Russian repression. The question whether art has not yet quite shaken off its theological origin and is still, to an extent, naively bound by its forms is one thing; but for it to be heteronomously subjected, from outside, to a bond from which it is already emancipated by its own meaning is quite another. In the great religious epochs of art, its theological content represented, for the most progressive minds, the truth – that dictated by the Russians is regressive and, in its imposition, is already, transparently, untruth. T.M. conceded the difference. – Max added that in the greatest epochs of church art, as in the high Renaissance, the patrons of artists such as Raphael were of the utmost liberality (their attitude on the delicate question of Joseph’s age). The Party Secretaries who command art production in Russia have the narrowest, most retarded, most benighted of minds – ‘blockheads’.
[106]
Music, before the bourgeoisie’s emancipation, had an essentially disciplinary function. Afterwards, it became autonomous, centred on its own formal laws, heedless of effect – a synthetic unity. But these two destinies mediate each other. For the formal law of freedom, which determines all moments and thus entirely circumscribes aesthetic immanence – is nothing other than the disciplinary function turned inwards, reflected, wrenched from its immediate social purpose. It might be said that the autonomy of the art-work has its source in heteronomy, much as the freedom of the subject arose from lordly sovereignty. The force enabling the work of art to constitute itself and dispense with a direct outward effect, is the force of this same effect in altered form; and the law to which it relates is no other than that which it112 imposes on others. This can be shown in detail in the obbligato style113 which Viennese classicism took over from the practice of fugue. This, however, has a decisive consequence. Autonomous music is not absolutely cut off from the context of effects: it mediates this context through its formal law. This is precisely what Kant called our awe before the sublime,114 though he did not yet apply this to art.115 The moment when the sublime becomes a totality, something immanent, is that of transcendence. ‘The glorious moment’ [‘Der glorreiche Augenblick’] (Georgiades’s idea of the festive),116 ‘striking sparks from the soul’,117 deriving from totality a sense of resistance, authority reverting to negation – all this is, in mediated form, the real function of the autonomous. [107]*
The opening of the third Leonore Overture sounds as if, from the depths of imprisonment, the ocean had been attained.
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Text I: The Mediation Between Music and Society
The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law. Its concrete deciphering in music is an essential task of musical sociology. Due to such hypostasis of the musical sphere, the problems of its objective content cannot be transformed directly into problems of its social genesis, but society as a problem – as the entirety of its antagonisms – immigrates into the problems, into the logic of the mind.
Let us reflect on Beethoven. If he is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society. In it, for all its idealism in tone and posture, the essence of society, for which he speaks as the vicar of the total subject, becomes the essence of music itself. Both are comprehensible in the interior of the works only, not in mere imagery. The central categories of artistic construction can be translated into social ones. The kinship with that bourgeois libertarianism which rings all through Beethoven’s music is a kinship of the dynamically unfolding totality. It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that his movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world.
In this respect Beethoven’s attitude on social objectivity is more that of philosophy – the Kantian, in some points, and the Hegelian in the decisive ones – than it is the ominous mirroring posture: in Beethoven’s music society is conceptlessly known, not photographed. What he calls thematic work is the mutual abrasion of the antitheses, the individual interests. The totality that governs the chemism of his work is not a cover concept schematically subsuming the various moments; it is the epitome of both that thematic work and its result, the finished composition. The tendency there is, as far as possible, to dequalify the natural material on which the work is confirmed. The motive kernels, the particulars to which each movement is tied, are themselves identical with the universal; they are formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own and preshaped by the totality as much as the individual is in individualistic society. The developing variation, an image of social labor, is definite negation: from what has once been posited it ceaselessly brings forth the new and enhanced by destroying it in its immediacy, its quasi-natural form.
On the whole, however, these negations are supposed – as in liberalist theory, to which, of course, social practice never corresponded – to have affirmative effects. The cutting short and mutual wearing down of individual moments, of suffering and perdition, is equated with an integration said to make each individual meaningful through its voidance. This is why the prima vista most striking formalists residue in Beethoven – the reprise, the recurrence, unshaken despite all structural dynamics, of what has been voided – is not just external and conventional. Its purpose is to confirm the process as its own result, as occurs unconsciously in social practice. Not by chance are some of Beethoven’s most pregnant conceptions designed for the instant of the reprise as the recurrence of the same. They justify, as the result of a process, what has been once before. It is exceedingly illuminating that Hegelian philosophy – whose categories can be applied without violence to every detail of a music that cannot possibly have been exposed to any Hegelian ‘influence’ in terms of the history of ideas – that this philosophy knows the reprise as does Beethoven’s music: the last chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology, the absolute knowledge, has no other content than to summarize the total work which claims to have already gained the identity of subject and object, in religion.
But that the affirmative gestures of the reprise in some of Beethoven’s greatest symphonic movements assume the force of crushing repression, of an authoritarian ‘That’s how it is,’ that the decorative gestures overshoot the musical events – this is the tribute Beethoven was forced to pay to the ideological character whose spell extends even to the most sublime music ever to aim at freedom under continued unfreedom. The self-exaggerating assurance that the return of the first is the meaning, the self-revelation of immanence as transcendence – this is the cryptogram for the senselessness of a merely self-reproducing reality that has been welded together into a system. Its substitute for meaning is continuous functioning.
All these implications of Beethoven result from musical analysis without any daring analogies, but to social knowledge they prove as true as the inferences about society itself. Society recurs in great music: transfigured, criticized, and reconciled, although these aspects cannot be surgically sundered; it looms as much above the activities of self-preserving rationality as it is suitable for befogging those activities. It is as a dynamic totality, not as a series of pictures, that great music comes to be an internal world theater. This indicates the direction in which we would have to look for a total theory of the relation of society and music.
[…] A composer is always a zoon politikon as well, the more so the more emphatic his purely musical claim. None is tabula rasa. In early childhood they adjusted to the goings-on around them; later they are moved by ideas expressing their own, already socialized form of reaction. Even individualistic composers from the flowering of the private sphere, men like Schumann and Chopin, are no exceptions; the din of the bourgeois revolution rumbles in Beethoven, and in Schumann’s Marseillaise quotations it echoes, weakened, as in dreams.
The fact that Beethoven’s music is structured like the society to which – with doubtful justification – we give the name of ‘rising bourgeoisie’, or at least like its self-consciousness and its conflicts, is premised on another fact: that the primary-musical form of his own views was inherently mediated by the spirit of his social class in the period around 1800. He was not the spokesman or advocate of this class, although not lacking in such rhetorical features; he was its inborn son.
[…] In Beethoven’s youth it meant something to be a genius. As fiercely as the gestures of his music rose against the social polish of the Rococo, he was backed by a good deal of social approval. In the age of the French Revolution the bourgeoisie had occupied economic and administrative key positions before seizing political power; this is what gave to the pathos of its libertarian movement* the costumed, fictitious character from which Beethoven, the self- appointed ‘brain owner’ as opposed to the landowner, was not free either.
That this archbourgeois was a protégé of aristocrats fits as neatly into the social character of his oeuvre as the scene we know from Goethe’s biography, when he snubbed the court. Reports on Beethoven’s personality leave little doubt of his anticonventional nature, a combination of sansculottism with Fichtean braggadocio; it recurs in the plebeian habitus of his humanity. His humanity is suffering and protesting. It feels the fissure of its loneliness. Loneliness is what the emancipated individual is condemned to in a society retaining the mores of the absolutist age, and with them the style by which the self-positing subjectivity takes its own measure.118 […] What has been called the obligatory style, rudiments of which are discernible as early as the seventeenth century, contains the teleological call for a wholly, thoroughly formed composition, a call for – an analogy to philosophy – a systematic composition. Its ideal is music as a deductive unit; whatever drops out of that unit, unrelated and indifferent, defines itself as a break and a flaw to begin with. That is the esthetic aspect of the fundamental thesis of Weber’s musical sociology, the thesis of progressive rationality.
Knowingly or not, Beethoven was an objective follower of this idea. He produces the total unity of the obligatory style by dynamization. The several elements no longer follow one another in a discrete sequence; they pass into rational unity through a continuous process effectuated by themselves. The conception lies all ready, so to speak, charted in the state of the problem offered to Beethoven by the sonata form of Haydn and Mozart, the form in which diversity evens out into unity but keeps diverging from it while the form remains an abstract sheath over the diversity. The irreducible vision, in an eye that in the most advanced production of his time, in the masterly pieces of the other two Viennese classicists, could read the question in which their perfection transcended itself and called for something else. This was how he dealt with the crux of the dynamic form, with the reprise, the conjuring of static sameness amid a total becoming. In conserving it, he has grasped the reprise as a problem. He seeks to rescue the objective formal canon that has been rendered impotent, as Kant rescued the categories: by once more deducing it from the liberated subjectivity. The reprise is as much brought on by the dynamic process as it ex post facto vindicates the process, so to speak, as its result. In this vindication the process has passed on what was then going to drive irresistibly beyond it.
But the deadlock between the dynamic and the static element coincides with the historic instant of a class that voids the static order and yet cannot yield, unfettered, to its own dynamics without voiding itself. The great social conceptions of Beethoven’s own time, Hegel’s philosophy of law and Comte’s positivism, have found words for this. And that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamics – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music, the sublime music, as a trait of esthetic untruth: by its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure, and that in turn affects the declamatory moments of the work of art. In truth content, or in its absence, esthetic and social criticism coincide. This is how little the relation of music and society can be superimposed on a vague and trivial Zeitgeist in which both are thought to share. Socially, too, music will be the more true and substantial the farther it is removed from the official Zeitgeist; the one of Beethoven’s epoch was represented by Rossini rather than by him. The social part is the objectivity of the thing itself, not its affinity to the wishes of the established society of the moment; on that point art and cognition are agreed.
[…] The interrelation of music and society becomes evident in technology. Its unfolding is the tertium comparations between superstructure and infrastructure. […] As an individual psychology, a mechanism of identification with technology as a social ego ideal evokes resistance and resistance only will create originality. There is nothing immediate in originality. Beethoven expressed that in a truth worthy of him, in the inexhaustible sentence that much of what we attribute to a composer’s original genius ought to be credited to his skilled use of a diminished 7th chord.
The adoption of established techniques by the spontaneous subject mostly brings their insufficiencies to light. If a composer tries to correct them, by posing problems in a technologically sharply defined form, the novelty and originality of his solution turns him at the same time into an executor of the social trend. The trend is waiting in those problems, waiting to shatter the shell of the extant. Individual musical productivity realizes an objective potential. August Halm – a man greatly underestimated nowadays – was almost the only one to sense that in his theory of musical forms as forms of the objective spirit, however dubious his static hypostasis of the forms of fugue and sonata may have been otherwise.119 The dynamic sonata form in itself evoked its subjective fulfillment even while hampering it as a tectonic schema. Beethoven’s technical flair united the contradictory postulates, obeying one through the other. As the obstetrician of such formal objectivity he spoke for the social emancipation of the subject, ultimately for the idea of a united society of the autonomously active. In the esthetic picture of a league of free men he went beyond bourgeois society. As art as appearance can be given the lie by the social reality that appears in it, it is permitted, conversely, to exceed the bounds of a reality whose suffering imperfections are what conjures up art.
Extract from Introduction to the Sociology of Music, transi, by E.B. Ashton, New York, Continuum, 1976, pp. 209-17
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